The Childhood Roots of Adult Confidence
A healthy and stable childhood has an even bigger impact on an adult’s sense of control in wealthier countries than in poorer ones.
2025Scientific Reportsn=202,898
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Mental Health20256 min read
A Blueprint for Understanding How Our Childhoods Shape Us
Analytic methodology for childhood predictor analyses for wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study
- By
- Padgett, R. Noah et al.
- Participants
- 200,000
- Countries
- 22
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Key Takeaways
01
This paper outlines a standardized statistical methodology for analyzing how childhood experiences predict adult well-being across 22 diverse countries in the Global Flourishing Study.
02
The analytical approach involves conducting separate regression analyses for each country to respect cultural variations, followed by a meta-analysis to synthesize the results and identify global patterns.
03
To ensure rigor and transparency, the methodology includes adjustments for complex survey designs, imputation for missing data, sensitivity analyses for unmeasured confounding, and openly available analysis code.
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Why It Matters
This research is the bedrock for a new generation of global well-being science. For scientists, it provides a gold-standard, open-source toolkit. It allows researchers from different fields and countries to work from a shared playbook, making their findings comparable and building a more cohesive understanding of the human condition. This prevents a scenario where every study uses slightly different methods, making it impossible to see the big picture.
